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AN INTERVIEW 

WITH 

OSBORN H. OLDROYD 



NEW YORK 
THE SUN 













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AN INTERVIEW 


WITH 

OSBORN H. OLDROYD 

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IN THE 



HOUSE IN WHICH LINCOLN DIED 


NEW YORK 
THE SUN 






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21 CCT 1908 





FORTY-EIGHT YEARS WITH 
LINCOLN 


YET OLDROYD NEVER SAW THE PRESIDENT 
IN PERSON 


His Life Devoted Since the Civil War to Collecting Relics 
of Lincoln and Articles Associated With Him—His 
Collection Now in the House in Which Lincoln Died. 


Washington, Nov. 9. —For a ready-made 
romance take the story of Osborn H. Oldroyd 
of Washington. It begins with a Saturday night 
in August, i860, when Oldroyd was 19 and kept 
a news stand in Mount Vernon, Ohio. 

“I used to get the Eastern papers from Pitts¬ 
burg,” he said to a Sun reporter, “and if there 
was anything new in the paper line the dealer 
would put in a sample copy and I could return- 
it or pay for it when I settled up with him. 

“All the boys in town used to gather in the 
store waiting for the New York Ledger and the 
Mercury so that they could find out what hap¬ 
pened next in the continued stories. They’d sit 
right down on the floor sometimes and start in to 
read, they were so eager to find how things came 
out. 

“This night that I’m telling you about there 
was a little paper-covered book in the bundle and 
one of the boys across the counter reached out 
and says: ‘What’s that? Let’s see it.’ 

“I picked it up and looked at it. ‘No,’ I says. 
‘I guess I’ll keep this and read it myself,’ and I 
put it back on the shelf. It was—wait a minute.” 

“He took out some keys, unlocked a cabinet and 


3 







placed a brown-covered pamphlet in his visitor’s 
hands. It is a rare little book now, but that is ■ 
not its chief source of interest. It calls for the 
attention of every American, for it was the 
nucleus of the collection now installed in the 
house where Lincoln died. 

It is the story of the forming of this collection 
that constitutes the romance of Mr. Oldroyd’s 
life. In fact it has been the whole end and aim 
of his life for years. 

The little pamphlet began it. The title was 
“The Life, Speeches and Public Service ot 
Abram Lincoln.” It was called the Wigwam 
edition, because the building where Lincoln was 
nominated was so called. It sold then at 25 
cents a copy, but if you have one to sell now 
you are likely to get a good many times 25 cents 
for it. 

Young Oldroyd read the book and was sc 
stirred by the achievements of Lincoln that he 
began to get together other campaign pamphlets 
and badges. He joined a club of boys, all too 
young to vote, but by no means too young to 
wear campaign badges and under the name of the 
Wide awake to do a great deal of parading and 
cheering. The badge he wore at that time is now 
in the Oldroyd collection. 

Then came the war. The youthful admirer of 
Lincoln enlisted and served until it was over. 
He carried his mania for collecting with him, 
but he did not give much thought to the picking 
up of Lincoln mementos then. 

All his efforts were bent on gathering war 
relics. It was not until the morning of April 15, 
1865, that the thing happened which determined 
his career. 

‘We were at Murfreesboro then,” said Mr. 
Oldroyd, “and that morning there was a sort of 
jubilation parade because of the surrender and 
the prospect of everything being settled. The 
band was playing ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ 
and the boys were all laughing and twitting one 
another as we marched along. 


4 


“Oh, that girl you left behind you has married 
another fellow long before this!” they’d say. 

“And so we were going on, full of life and 
spirits, when an orderly rode up to the officer and 
gave him a paper. We were halted and faced 
| forward, the band was stopped in the middle of 
i the piece and the officer read the news. 

“Lincoln was dead. Without a word, except 
of command, we reversed arms and marched 
back, the band playing a dirge. And every fel¬ 
low’s head was down and every man looked as 
•if he was going to his own father’s funeral. 

“Well, as soon as we disbanded I went up to 
headquarters. Outside, tacked on a bulletin 
board, were three despatches. The first said: 
‘Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre. 
Mortally wounded.’ The second was: ‘Abra¬ 
ham Lincoln not expected to live.’ And the 
third: ‘Abraham Lincoln died at 22 minutes past 
7 this morning.’ 

“I went in and asked the man in charge if I 
could have the three bulletins when they were 
through with them. He said—why, yes, I could. 
I told him I hoped they wouldn’t get torn off or 
mutilated in any way, that I was afraid they 
might. 

“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll 
write some new ones and put them out right now 
and you can take these.’ 

“He did it and here are the originals. From 
that time I saved everything I could get hold of 
that had anything to do with the life and acts of 
Lincoln.” 

It was not until chance—future generations may 
call it Providence—sent him to Springfield, Ill., 
that Mr. Oldroyd’s passion for gathering Lincoln 
relics had its full opportunity. When he went 
there a German was occupying the old Lincoln 
homestead, renting it from Robert T. Lincoln. 
Mr. Oldroyd determined to as soon as the chance 
came to live in the old home of the man he loved 
and revered. 

In 1883 the German moved out and Mr. Old- 

5 


royd took the house at $20 a month. In the 
meantime he had been accumulating a host of 
relics. 

When the Lincolns went to Washington in 
1861 they sold all their household furniture at 
Springfield. In this way it became scattered, 
and it was by securing a piece here and a piece 
there that the collector got together his treas¬ 
ures. 

In 1888 Mr. Oldroyd asked Robert T. Lincoln 
if he would not present the Springfield house to 
the State. Mr. Lincoln wrote that he did not 
want to offer it lest it might be construed as a 
political move, but that if the State asked for it 
he would present it. 

The matter was arranged. The house became 
the property of the State and Mr. Oldroyd offered 
his collection on condition that he remain in 
charge of it at a salary during his lifetime. That 
was agreed to and for a few years the collection 
was open to the public in the old home. 

‘‘Then Altgeld became Governor,” said Mr. 
Oldroyd quietly, “and gave me two weeks to get 
out.” 

It was a hard blow. Years of time and all the 
money he could spare had been put into the work 
of forming a collection which he believed would 
become one of the most interesting and valuable 
legacies this generation could leave to the coun¬ 
try. Yet nobody seemed willing to help him carry 
the burden of its maintenance. 

He was yielding to the thought of selling it 
when a telegram came from the Lincoln Me¬ 
morial Association at Washington. It was fol¬ 
lowed by letters full of enthusiastic predictions of 
what would happen if Mr. Oldroyd would bring 
the great collection to Washington and place it on 
exhibition in the house where Lincoln died. 
Why, according to the sanguine ideas of those 
who wrote to Mr. Oldroyd, -the negroes alone 
would rush in such numbers to view the relics 
of the Emancipator that a gold mine would seem 
poor in comparison. 


6 


So the collection came to its present home. 
The rent was $100 a month and the memorial 
association paid it for a year. 

The negroes showed an unexpected indiffer¬ 
ence and the thousands of men and women who 
visit Washington were slow to find out the high 
red house in Tenth street. There were three 
months in 1894 when the receipts were $8, $12.50 
and $17—with rent, however, remaining station¬ 
ary at $100 all the time. 

It was hard pulling, indeed, but in 1897 the 
Government bought the house and the collection 
is kept there free of rent. There are plenty of 
persons who say that the Government ought to 
buy the collection too, and some of them are 
working toward that end. If they succeed in 
persuading Congress to buy it they should see 
that the collector himself goes with the rest. All 
the inanimate things which crowd the rooms 
seem to speak of Lincoln, but none of these is so 
impressive, when one stops to think of it, as the 
man who has devoted nearly fifty years of his 
life to perpetuating the memory of his hero. 

“Do you never get tired of it?” asked the re¬ 
porter after listening to one visitor after another 
ask the same questions, calling for the repetition 
of the same stories and explanations. 

“Tired?” was the quiet reply. “Does a man get 
tired of his profession if it is a profession he 
loves; preaching, or medicine, or law? This is 
my profession. 

“1 would have been a collector, anyway. It is 
as natural to me as breathing. But when you 
add to that instinct the interest of doing some¬ 
thing that is of lasting value to the country-” 

he shook his head—“no, I don’t get tired of it.” 

“Tell me how you happened to get some of 
these relics—the cradle in which the Lincoln 
children were rocked.” 

“Well, before Lincoln went to Washington he 
sent this cradle down t.o a store in Springfield, 
kept by a man named John Williams. There 
were a good many clerks in the store, but none 


7 


of them was married. Lincoln said to the pro¬ 
prietor : 

“Friend Williams, here’s a cradle that we’re 
through with and I want you to put it up in your 
storeroom and give it to the first one of your 
clerks that gets married and has a baby to rock 
in it:” 

“So Mr. Williams took it and gave it to a 
clerk, who, by the .way, married a friend of my 
wife who was a Springfield girl herself. They 
moved out West and before they started the 
cradle was sold at auction along with some other 
things. 

A man named Whitecraft heard a stranger in 
town say that he was going to get that cradle. 
Whitecraft didn’t really want it, but he was 
bound the stranger shouldn’t get it, so he bid it 
in. 

“Then he put it down cellar or in some damp 
place and when I moved 'into the Lincoln home¬ 
stead and he found I was making such a good 
collection, he sent it to me. The legs were rotted 
from the dampness, but I had it all fixed up a£d 
there it is.” 

If he had added “as large as life,” he would 
have spoken to the point, for it is positively tl}e 
largest cradle to be seen. It is like a small bed on 
rockers. 

Close to it is an old fashioned office chair with 
signs of long and hard usage written all over it. 

“Yes, that was Lincoln’s chair in his law office 
at Springfield,” was the response to a question. 
“I got it from William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s 
old law partner. He had been using it himself 
for years after Lincoln’s death until one day 
when I was in his office I said to him: 

“ ‘I believe you could find a chair that would 
be more comfortable for you and more orna¬ 
mental to your office.’ 

“ ‘I don’t know but you’re right,’ he said. 

“ ‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘go down stairs and pick 
out any chair you like in the furniture store and 
I’ll pay for it.’ 


8 


“He did so and I carried off this with his signed 
| statements as to its genuineness. 

“That haircloth sofa and the haircloth rocking 
chair next to it were sold when Lincoln went to 
Washington. Some sisters by the name of Rock¬ 
well who were dressmakers bought several things 
at the Lincoln sale, but I got them back when 
they left town some years later.” 

“How did you get Booth’s spur?” 

“Well, I tramped out over the road by which 
he escaped and I interviewed everybody along 
the route. There were very few who had been 
living there at the time of the assassination. 

“One of these was Mrs. Mudd, wife of Dr. 
Mudd, to whose house Booth went and where 
; he stayed while the doctor treated his injuries. 
I got the spur from a neighboring farmer. 

“Here are some of the most interesting things 
in the collection,” showing a good-sized candle, 
discolored by age, and beside it a black-handled 
table knife with some hardened substance adher¬ 
ing to the blade. “The room here, where Lincoln 
breathed his last, was rented at that time by a 
| young mail named Clark. 

“After the President’s body was removed Clark 
[ found this candle, with which the surgeons had 
heated the plaster, and this knife, with which they 
had applied it. That is some of the plaster that 
is still clinging to the blade. 

“Clark kept them as relics and sent them to his 
sweetheart up at Boston. After his death his 
wife—his former sweetheart—let me have them. 

“Clark also had a small lock of Lincoln’s hair; 
not very much, but genuine. It was a little of 
that which was cut by the surgeons that night. 
Mrs. Clark always said I should have it after her 
death; but when that happened it came into the 
possession of a sister out West. She says I shall 
have it in time, but the time hasn’t come yet. 

“There is one lock in the Army Medical Mu¬ 
seum, one in the possession, I suppose, of John 
Hay’s heirs and another is owned by a son of 
Dr. Taft, who was one of the surgeons. Dr. Taft 


9 




promised that it should come to this collection 
after his death, but his son wants $1,000 for it. 

“Those are the only genuine locks I know of, 
though I have been offered a good many that 
claimed to be genuine. One woman sent me, on 
approval, a lock of rather light brown hair of 
fine, soft texture. She assured me that it was 
genuine, having been cut from the President’s 
head by ‘Dr. Bliss, the physician in attendance.’ 
Of course it was evident that she had confused 
Garfield with Lincoln and was probably sincere 
in her offer. 

“But you have no idea how every man, woman 
or child who ever had the merest glimpse of Lin¬ 
coln has magnified that connection with him. 
Some of them have made out very interesting 
stories indeed, and have told them so often that 
they have really come to believe in them. 

“I lived in Springfield so long that now when 
I read some of the later biographies of Lincoln I 
have to smile as I recognize the stories that I 
saw in the making, as it were. But I can tell 
you one thing. No one who goes through the 
country where Lincoln passed his early life will 
pick up any stories that need suppressing. 

“I used to scour the whole neighborhood when 
I lived in Springfield, searching for relics and 
information. In order to get at the people in a 
sort of informal way I’d take my gun along and 
do a little hunting as an excuse for being out. 

“Then I’d drop in and stay all night at a farm 
house, and it didn’t need much effort among any 
of the old timers to start the conversation going 
about Lincoln. And I want to tell you this: I 
never heard a word against him. I never heard 
of an action that was not clean and honorable and 
kindly. Every man reverenced his memory and 
every woman loved it. 

“And here’s another thing that’s remarkable. 
You notice that things here are not guarded with 
any excessive precautions. People are free to go 
through the rooms alone. 

“The other day some one asked me if I had 


io 


j lost anything at the hands of Souvenir hunters; 
i if they had taken pieces of haircloth from the 
furniture or cut splinters from the chair or the 
\ desk. I’ve been here fourteen years and I have 
never lost so much as a sliver of wood or a 
shred of paper that was of value because of its 
association with Lincoln. 

*‘A man came to me one time after he had gone 
; through the museum and said: ‘I’m a collector 
in various ways myself and I admit that to a 
man with the collector’s instinct it isn’t always 
' easy to see the difference between mine and 
' thine. I admit, too, that I thought pretty covet¬ 
ously about a great many things I’ve seen here; 
and I realized that it would have been a com- 
I paratively easy matter for me to—to annex them, 
j But I vow I couldn’t. I had an indefinable feel¬ 
ing that a man had to be honest when Honest 
Abe’s belongings were all around.’ ” 

All of these things are told quietly and simply. 
They are not rattled off parrotwise to every one 
who will listen. But every question is answered 
with a directness, and to an interested listener 
with a feeling which shows how the thought of 
Lincoln, for he never saw the man himself, has 
become the most vital thing in life to this man, 
his monument builder. 

J No wonder! More than forty years he has 
' lived with that thought; has read, talked, listened, 
dreamed of Lincoln; has spent his time and his 
money hunting, as it were, for Lincoln. His 
past seems to begin with Lincoln; his present to 
be filled with Lincoln; and on what he has done 
for Lincoln he builds his hope of future recog¬ 
nition. 

“If some one had done for Washington,” he 
says, “what I have done for Lincoln, wouldn’t we 
be glad now?” 






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